The Data Coach

Jun 2, 2020

We explore the quantitative, scientific, and data-driven new frontier of coaching.  Major League baseball is undergoing a coaching revolution from old-school to new tech. We talk to players whose careers were turned around not by a charismatic coach, but by data, and the techies who coach them. We see how data coaching is creeping into the workspace with a computerized conversation coach that has pinned the successful sales pitch down to a science.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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for roughly 5,000 years people call themselves doctors and pretended to know all sorts of things that they didn't know and were as likely to kill you is to cure you

these doctors existed because sick people desperately wanted to believe in them coaching feels the same way to me

for decades people just sort of hoped that if a man was hollering at them he must be helping them to win maybe he was sometimes but that's not my point my point is that even if coaches have no effect on performance even if they're doing more harm than good we might still insist on having them because we need someone on our side to believe in

coaching is changing in the same way medicine changed a hundred years ago coaches are discovering science and science is discovering them I'm Michael Lewis and this is against the rules a show about various authority figures in American life this season is about the rise of coaches and this episode is about data and pitching

a while back in 2003 I published a book called Moneyball it's about how the Oakland A's baseball team had used data analysis to get an edge on everyone else they were poorly funded team in a small Market they had no money to spend on players but they're new and better statistics enable them to Value baseball players more accurately so they could sell the players that were overvalued and trade for the ones that were undervalued I remember at the time being shocked at the notion that baseball players could be Miss value

I mean baseball players have been doing the same job for a century out in the open in front of millions of people

it's suddenly all over a thing that had been done a certain way forever was now being done a totally different way

everyone in baseball started using data and getting all sorts of insights from it and the insights LED not just to better valuations of baseball players it eventually led to a new kind of coaching in the past it used to be that many coaching positions were almost a sinecure that's been Lindbergh co-author of a book called the MVP machine it's about a revolution in how the world's best baseball players get coached it was the coaches who were the managers Pals his drinking buddies

would become the coaches and there wasn't that much coaching going on at the major league level it was sort of reinforcing lessons that had already been taught and keeping guys in line but there wasn't that much expectation that coaches would improve players once they got to that level but that was about to change Big Time Ben was part of a huge and growing crowd of data Geeks outside of baseball who spent lots and lots of time analyzing players and building models

has to try to predict their performance as sophisticated as the statistical projection models are they only really look at the Players past performance and his age and maybe some comparable players from the past and they'll spit out a projection that say well he was this good in the past few years and we'll adjust for the ballpark and here's how old he is and so here's our median projection for him and so all of a sudden their players who were just busting out of those projections exactly and a projection system would never forecast that it might say that someone's

to get a bit better but worse but typically it won't say that someone is going to do something that's completely out of line with their past performance in other words teams had gotten really good or at least a lot better at evaluating the potential of all their players but the players were still playing better than expected so much better that the analysts were a bit suspicious by the last time you saw this with his with the steroids era that all of a sudden people players were performing in ways that the projection models

would never have guessed and you're so you're kind of seeing it but without without an exit and explanation is obvious as steroids exactly yeah then started looking into what these players were doing the ones who were dramatically exceeding the analyst expectations the over performers all had something in common coaches who use new technology one of the really big Innovations has been the high-speed camera so a company called edgertronic which

develop these cameras for scientific purposes as found that much of its business has come from baseball teams because baseball teams have found that if you train these hide speed cameras on players you can perceive things about players movement that they didn't know about themselves and the coaches using these cameras were very different from the Old School baseball coach has the sinecure guys for a start the new coaches weren't former big-league players in some cases they didn't even know any big

league players my name is Kyle Bode like this guy I was 22 years old I started coaching little league and I realized quickly that I just didn't know anything about coaching Kyle had just moved from Ohio to Seattle where he landed a part-time job as a little league coach yep that's how he started in life as a little league baseball coach and played some my father was a coach but I figured I owed it to the kids to learn just a little bit more about keeping their arms healthy and he had some questions like

how many pitches should a kid be allowed to throw and what was the best way to throw them I mean I was once a picture and I spent half my life with my arm in an ice bucket to this day I can't sleep on my right shoulder throwing a ball overhand it might look like a natural and healthy thing to do but it's not Kyle Bode looked around for research on the subject but unfortunately it was all very nonspecific kind of very academic research and then the training programs in the coaching programs that were out there were very

Bland not based on any sort of evidence it really shocked me so Kyle started to do research on his own then he got a promotion from Little League to the freshman team at a Seattle high school but he found himself at war with the JV and varsity coaches at the high school they were coaching the old-fashioned way telling players what to do hollering at them when they screwed up praising them when they didn't actively coaching athletes just typically makes them worse

just intervention is typically one of the worst things you can do what are the points of friction with the old coaching model like what specifically kind of things would you do that were heretical so informing the athlete that like whatever they're doing is not good enough and then just seeing how they change over time and how they will self-organized was a real heretical idea right because most coaches think that they have a lot to give to the athlete and my view on it still is today

is that they're good enough like we just need to give them the right direction and let them figure it out for the most part you ever read a book called the inner game of tennis I have yeah it's one of my favorites

anyway in his first year coaching Kyle's freshman team won as many games as they lost which was actually pretty great that season the school's varsity and JV teams were losing most of their games but at the end of the year the head coach fired Kyle because the other coaches hated his methods they thought he had no clue how to coach that didn't stop Kyle he doubled down on his approach

and he wound up building what amounted to a baseball Bionic Man Factory Driveline baseball he called it

so describe to me this laboratory you build in its current Incarnation it's about 15 high-speed motion tracking cameras there's Force plates in there to measure ground reaction forces attracts every movement 240 times per second and it's submillimeter accurate so every movement can be tracked down to at least one millimeter of accuracy and usually much better let's go

a hundred points for 93.7 The high-speed cameras allow Kyle to measure the speed of a pitcher's arm among other things the faster a pitcher's arm the faster the ball comes out of it in theory 100 3.0

in practice not all pitchers are able to translate their arm speed into ball speed two guys with the exact same arm speeds might throw very different fast balls if someone's arm speed is extremely high and the ball comes out at like a lower predicted velocity based on like a regression algorithm that we know that there's some inefficiencies there that we should be able to easily clean up that is you could identify people with the god-given talent to throw a baseball because you add new insight into where that

I want came from so when that happens are you thinking there's this pool of players out there who have high arm speed low velocity that we can just fix that's all that I think about pretty much every day and could you like drive around with a little truck that and put people in the back of your truck and test their arm speed is that what you would do yeah that's actually funny we almost bought an RV to do exactly that the drive around the country with our lab it turned out he didn't need to drive around looking for people with this

weird arm Talent they found him

I realized that I needed to make a change going into the season I was helping out my dad's team and trying to make money in every way that's Matt Boyd back in 2017 he was an unknown minor league pitcher coming off a terrible season he had a below average fastball around 89 miles an hour oh and he had an arm injury the way he was going he's about to be spending a lot more time with his mom and dad over the Christmas break one of my dad's players came back and he was a 90 91 92 guy in high school

or and he was at Oregon State and after the fall he was 98 miles per hour oh and what whoa whoa whoa I got what were you doing down there he's like I did the Driveline program Driveline that's Kyle bodis lab so at that point Kyle would have been kind of a local secret so someone all of a sudden has this kind of miraculous jump in velocity you hear about it and you go see you call Kyle you did you ever heard of him at that point no hadn't heard of him

Matt goes to see Kyle and his Bionic Man Factory in here we have cameras radar guns I go up a little stairwell and here's you know a little eight foot wide by 10 foot high probably pitching Lane tunnel created with all this technology in there and there's Kyle behind a computer and he runs me through the program at that point had you ever seen the technology that was there no and honestly I did I couldn't even told you right today or what I saw in there I couldn't

I told you what was going on bunch of fucking lids for some curve ball drills looks like just a lot of gizmos a lot of gizmos a lot of wires a lot of interesting looking baseball's a lot of lines on a pitching mound and stuff and you know Kyle explain to me what the concept of what he does and we talked about it and then we just started the program

Kyle put Matt Boyd through a bunch of tests the big one was to test his arm speed but he never used the phrase arm speed Kyle actually never told Matt what he was testing for the he in our lab tested higher than pretty much everyone and still almost everyone to this day he's just an excellent athlete and yet the ball velocity wasn't where it needed to be or where it predicted it should be so what was the inefficiency like what was what was he doing that cause the ball to come out more slowly than it what you would have predicted

right it's really hard we don't know the root cause yet that's that's the actual interesting thing is we're still studying like why this happens at the lab Kyle hands Matt these really heavy balls to throw he's found that when people throw a heavy ball their body naturally finds the most efficient way to do it because it's so painful and uncomfortable to throw it in efficiently Matt basically moves into The Bionic Man Factory and throws heavy balls the entire off

season then rejoins his minor league team

and you know I get down there I tell him I'm full progression off the mound and they're like okay well let's see it my first Bullpen I'm not have 92 to 95 oh and I think everyone's going what the heck happened you know and even I am I'm going man I'm throwing the baseball up in the zone now this is amazing this is so cool like when all of a sudden you've got this new weapon yeah when you got this fastball that's coming out of your hand three or four miles an hour faster than it usually does what do you notice in

in in what happened and how hitters respond and how it how the effectiveness hitters have against you I remember going in to double-a that season and I did we had a catcher named Jack Murphy who was about four five years older than me and he went up and told me he goes Maddie you have a new fastball you need to pitch off it I remember I was kind of scared I was like what I've never done that in my life I was fastball changeup and then I mix my curveball and you know but he challenged me and all of a sudden I'm like striking guys Island three fastballs and double-a and I'm going like is

this easy like this is all it took by the end of that season Matt Boyd had been called up to the major leagues to the Detroit Tigers to be a starting pitcher paints and then paints away both fast balls what do pitch to bird another strikeout for Matthew Boyd to start the fourth

they now pay him 5.3 million dollars a year and feel like they're getting a deal and Kyle bode well now he has a new job too and the president and founder of Dr Lin baseball and the director of pitching initiatives of the Cincinnati Reds

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somebody asked the question how do you throw a ball faster they gather data they measure everything that the human body does when it throws a ball they test theories and find answers rooted in science all of a sudden there's a new way to coach and it's getting adopted in sports

but not just in sports because there are people all over who don't know why they're good at something or how to get better about five years ago I was CEO at a software company and we're growing pretty quickly this is a meat Bend off five years ago he was just another Silicon Valley entrepreneur trying to get his product out the door by using sales people but I was puzzled why some of our people were more

successful than others and every time they do want to do understand why we had to go and interview people and see what they think and they didn't want just a collection of stories he wanted data why did some sales pitches work while others didn't

think about like football right or our baseball right if if the coach never sees the game and the only things to understand how to get better is by interviewing some of the players what they think has happened so I wanted to have like something like a game tape and game stats for sales and AI to understand what really separates the top performers from everybody else

you know that message that you get on customer service calls this call may be recorded for quality assurance

companies were recording their sales calls but no one was really listening to them and meet wanted to listen to all the game tape and analyze it and I then start asking a bunch of other people you know if we build a system kind of shine a light on conversation and give you insights from that would you buy a how much you willing to pay and meet created a new company he called it Kong he went to people and said hand me all the recordings of all your sales calls plus a list of your salespeople in order of how good they are

we'll analyze it and so if you'd gone to just one of those top salespeople and ask what you doing that works no no absolutely not because they don't know people think it's an art right it's like they're not aware that is something that they're doing because they don't know what the other people are doing so they don't know what the differences are the Kong artificial intelligence had no theory about what worked and what didn't in sales it just had millions of sales pitches its search for patterns

in both the calls they got results and the calls that didn't the Gog actually learns like he it looks at the salespeople and says like which one is closing more deals and as starts to analyze the different so the software learns automatically you just connect to the calls

if there was an art to any of this it was in the questions that Kong asked if the phone call data I mean a very simple one is like percent of talk time right you and I are talking right now and by the end of the call Kong say well I meet was talking 56 percent of the time it turns out there's lots of things it's separated great sales pitch from a bad one the simple virtues are sort of obvious but they could now be Quantified on average 46%

talktime is ideal 13 questions is optimal right not less no more so this alone is Food For Thought that there's a maximum amount of time to be talking if I were to talk only 46 percent of the time with my wife stop telling me that I don't listen what if I counted the number of questions I asked in a particular conversation and stopped myself at 13 I mean it's not that if you ask 14 you lose dit deal but

but more than that people might lose their patience and to less it means you're talking too much patience Factor that's like a pretty big challenge for a lot of people there are too quick to respond so it's a good practice to pause think and then reply we all know that in theory at least gone could act just like a game coach just blast instructions into a person's ear as they pitch the product shut the hell up

ask another question you're at 73% ameet decided it was better if he didn't do this if he offered the feedback after the call instead we know will alert the coaches to here like three conversations that have room for improvement and then the coach will open them up just like a game tape and start breaking it down to start commenting oh man it 306 I really love the way you phrase that question

and have you considered X-Man if I were in sales all this would drive me batshit which is why I'm not in sales and also probably why everyone but my mother is still making fun of my podcast ad reads but for people who actually make their living selling stuff well Kong is their new best coach so when I'm engaging with a customer especially in introductory calls I want them to do as much of the talking as possible that's Megan Dorner who sells software for a Canadian company called

Avec I have no idea what the software does but that's not important the key fact about it is that it needs to be sold the more the customers talking the more that I'm I'm learning especially like I said on an on that first call and so the longest customer story again is how long they're telling a you know an interactive I guess one long tail so that the customers monologuing that's good that's correct that's correct but if your monologuing it's bad

Megan now pays attention to who's monologuing because Kong forces her to five minutes after every call she gets a note from Kong filled with stats and a color-coded report card one of the grades is based on the length of her monologues when the customer monologues gong doesn't call it that they call it a story if you've got a woman of few words on the other end of the line there's not much you can do to tease a big story

out of her you totally right and that's when I find that my longest monologue longest customer story and talk ratio could be all in yellow yellow is gong's color grade for a sea green is in a red is an F Megan's never in the red she's one of our Vic's top salespeople and also almost by definition A salesperson that Kong thinks is great the only yellow card she's ever likely to get from going as for

de I swear who likes other people I like talking I like engaging I also like to be right I like to help I like to you know give the information I think is going to be helpful and so I eager to do that so in a funny way you had to be a different kind of person when you were a salesperson then you were just out in the world that's correct

all this leads to an obvious thought if gong's report cards work for sales why stop there

so after I'll be with my friends or with family I'll think to myself after I leave God I interrupted a lot and it's just it's always in the back of my mind now because I see it so often that my patients is low is it gone that made you aware of it more so than before absolutely does anybody around you since that your approach is changing at all is anybody noted to you that you know you're all of a sudden listening

better to me my spouse has does that count oh my God tell me about that yes so I I we've had the conversation after we've left a social setting where I said God I did I was interrupting a lot at dinner or whatever and she has said to me you know you've been actually better than you have been previous you know you're getting better at listening to getting better at not interrupting so she has noticed that yeah I don't

don't do it quite as often did you then explain to her why you weren't doing it as often no absolutely not life is a market everyone's always looking for edges that other people don't have even a nice Canadian woman knows better than to give her Secrets away

do you think the world would be a better place if we were all Kong in all of our conversations

I think it depends on the level of you know give a shit that the person has to want to do better or be better right but I think a lot of people who spend a lot of time just talking about themselves are unaware how much time they're spending talking about themselves that's very true yeah there's no question that the future of this is Kong trying to figure out

and reduce to little color coated bars what it is that causes a person to like another person oh yeah

which is scary when you think about it but incredibly useful gong's now being used by 50,000 salespeople it almost a thousand different companies we grab Megan sort of at random and she's a sample size of one but it's not hard to see how this new coaching tool might shape Behavior it creates new stats Kong stats the stats capture something true about the performance the same way that I don't know on-base percentage captured something true about a baseball hitters performance the

pays more to the people with good stats and so soon everyone's just adjusting their game baseball hitters are learning plate discipline and sales people are learning patience most salespeople has a light Kong as like change my game Forever This is a meat Bend off again they use those were like a game changer it is possible if if your product is good or competitive in the market it doesn't matter if you had like 13 question right I mean it's like so there's only so much that you can do

do I mean there's like this is not some kind of magic it's just like facts but there's something else that happens with data in the right analysis of it it causes all kinds of folk beliefs to just disappear let me give you an anecdote so a lot of the the manager is in the coaches are often obsessed with filler words when we introduce the product oh can you track like filler words you know like booms and alms and like and so and like it drives them nuts

but you know what we ran the research and turns out there is zero correlation between like usage of filler words and success huh so so that parameter doesn't really matter the managers were thinking that the more filler words the worse yes right it is annoying to hear them when you listen to a recording and there's and people say like a hundred times it drives you nuts right right the fact is it doesn't matter

the fact is you never know any of this without all these facts Kong is screwing up everybody's assumptions like the recent one was using swear words on calls does it help does it get any way or does it even matter and what's the answer so it depends what the correlation with the research shows I said I assume it depends on what you're selling like if you're selling Bibles it probably doesn't help yeah yeah we didn't have any Bible cell

so in here in a stats but it's run over like you know 50,000 people so it's a fairly large number but the corollary is that depends who starts first if the buyer starts with curse words and you match that that that's actually works better but if you started it doesn't help you might fucking believe that or you might fucking not the point is that it doesn't matter what you believe the day

degenerates the knowledge and the knowledge allows you to coach people how to do better at the most basic human activity talking can you imagine a future like that distant future where human interactions will have changed pretty meaningfully because we'll all have been coached up and how to have conversations absolutely the device that they're using today like namely like speech or the English language hasn't

changed much for thousands of years where the amount of information that we need to exchange today and amount of noise and clutter and the environment is so different that it could definitely use an upgrade an upgrade hmm well one thing hasn't changed if there better ways to manipulate people salespeople will find them first and the rest of us will just follow we focus on things that are teachable are coachable all right we can teach anybody how to be funny where let me

stop let me stop you let me stop you for a second I'm sorry I know I interrupted but this is important you don't think you could teach people to be funny well we haven't been able to crack that code yet maybe a meat hasn't cracked that code but that doesn't mean that it can't be cracked

will you can measure precise things contained in the conversation the words that people are saying to each other and how it influences outcomes Allison would Brooks is an associate professor at the Harvard Business School like we're on a date do you want to go out with me again we're on a sales call did it convert to a sale all kinds of things that you can connect the content of the conversation with things that really matter with outcomes that really matter Professor Brooks takes all these conversations and analyzes them she's using the same new machine

turning the gong uses but she's looking for different things give me an example one example of something that you can you learn from this technology like something someone says that leads the other person to say want to go on a date and I'll give you that exact example we have a data set of people doing speed dating each person went on like 20 dates okay quick four to five minute speed dates in a round robin fashion at the end of each day you say are you willing to go out with that person again

and they record and transcribe all the interactions so now we see exactly what people are saying on their dates and we can measure what are the things that people are doing and saying that make them more likely to be more dateable in the future and one thing that really matters is question asking so asking more questions for both men and women on these heterosexual dates leads to better dating outcomes really especially follow-up question how do you know that the people who are asking the questions aren't just naturally more attracted to the people who they're asking the questions of

so two things one we can control for other aspects of attractiveness in this observational data to we then come back to Harvard and run experiments where we tell people ask a lot of questions and one condition or another condition where we say we don't tell them anything in the condition where they're asking a lot of questions they also are more attractive and likable this new line of research has uncovered the various ways that people gain power and authority in conversation this professor can prove that they work and it's just

made her want to ask even more questions even if you know conceptually what a charismatic smooth productive conversationalist looks like is there any way that you can train people to actually get better at executing it Brooks has all this data some of it from Kong but also from doctor's appointments and work meetings and parole interviews and speed dating sessions and on and on and on she uses the data to test theories about conversations and one of those

Aries is about humor there's this great work that this sense of play right is like the key to psychological safety and thriving and creativity it's the only way that you can really be creative in the presence of others if it is if you feel safe to say something stupid and silly that all sounds sensible to me but do you have any like data to back up absolutely absolutely what's the date me tell you about one papers it's a bi-directional finding meaning people who

who have high status tend to be more free and use humor more freely but the more interesting direction is if you are of low status if you can land a joke people perceive you as higher status a lot of polite laughter happens so but if other people think what you said is actually funny appropriate for the circumstances and at least one person laughs at it your status takes us huge jump totally true right

so yes it pays to be funny funny gets you status and Status gets you money but the mystery remains can funny be coached there's a part of me that wonders if there is a version of what's going on in baseball coaching that doesn't apply to what you're doing and what's going on baseball coaching is the technology has generated all this data about how a pitcher's body moves and they're able to identify people

who have an aptitude for doing things that is untapped because they have whatever the fundamental attribute is arm speed that you can teach but but that translating the arm speed into a speed on a fastball is a different thing and I wonder if there's an equivalent in conversation where you could identify the core traits that lead to conversational excellence and you can figure out who's sort of maxing out and who's not and why

totally

and not only that Alison's taken everything she's learned about human speech humor in the rest and built it into a new course at the Harvard Business School it's called how to talk gooder in business and in life it's trying to turn conversation into a science it's like having the right arm for the fastball and not doing it quite right you've got the brain space and the ability to do it you just didn't think to do it that's the dream scenario and that's really the hope with these HBS

that's right these are super smart people who maybe just haven't heard the right strategies hundreds of Harvard students tried to get into Alison's new class she accepted 70 70 of the world's most ambitious people hoping that the science of conversation will offer them yet another Edge in life many people would find it odd to approach a conversation seeking to maximize the profits of it exactly oh it's they won't know love it they love it they want to perform optimally and

way in their lives and this is the moment to moment way that you achieve that moment to moment and in each moment there's now data which can be used by a coach I'll be checking in with Allison's students next week and asking a new question when you start to get an edge like this a data Edge does the coaching start to shade into something else something that's maybe against the rules

I'm Michael Lewis thanks for listening to against the rules against the rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries the shows produced by our drug dealing and Catherine Gerardo or Gerardo or Gerardo or Gerardo I've never gotten it right with research assistance from Lydia Gene cot and zuy win our editor is the Magnificent Julia Barton who finds my every mistake Mia Lobel is our

give producer and she disapproves of me half the time our theme was composed by Nick Patel who is really slumming it working here with additional scoring by Stellwagen Symphony net we got fact-checked by Beth Johnson which was totally unnecessary because our facts are always right and our show was recorded by Topher Ruth and Trey shilts in spite of enduring the coronavirus in the studio which is the north gate studios in Berkeley as always thanks to pushkin's Founders Jacob

Weisberg who I think of as my brain and Malcolm Gladwell who I think of as my goal

do you sense that the challenge with man is different from The Challenge with women we do have a good amount of research on gender in conversation for example we know Mattia smell the University of Arizona has this great paper showing that men and women are equally talkative and even though women have The Stereotype of being chattier what he finds is that men and women both speak about 16 thousand words per day so that's about similar but what we do know from other research has that men and women

peek at different times especially in the workplace you know I find I speak when a woman needs something explain to her exactly you my hands are in thanks Michael and a half thousand of my words every day just to do that and for some reason for some reason they don't appreciate it if this just and I could I learn how to get them to appreciate it by coming to your class no kind of class is this

oh my gosh do funny